Aachen
(town, palace) West central German town, known for its hot springs. Aachen’s significance is linked to Charlemagne, who created a Carolingian palace complex there, where he was buried. Successive ...
Aaronios
(᾽Ααρώνιος, ᾽Ααρών), Byz. noble family descended from the last Bulgarian tsar, John Vladislav, whose wife Maria was granted the title zoste patrikia soon after 1018 and settled in Constantinople. Her ...
Abbasid
A member of a dynasty of caliphs who ruled in Baghdad from 750 to 1258, named after Abbas (566–652), the prophet Muhammad's uncle and founder of the dynasty.
abbess
The head of certain autonomous houses of nuns. The title is used among Benedictines, Cistercians, Trappists, Poor Clares, and some canonesses. The earliest known instance is in 514. In the Middle ...
Abbey of Savigny
In Normandy. In 1093 Vitalis of Mortain established a hermitage in the Forest of Savigny. Some of the hermits felt a call to follow the Rule of St Benedict in its primitive strictness, and the abbey ...
Abbo of Saint-Germain
(9th c.)A strange war correspondent, Abbo, a monk of the monastery of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, described the siege of Paris by the Vikings in 885–886. Having come from the west (Neustria) ...
abbot of Reichenau Bern(o) Augiensis
(r. 1008–48) Music theorist and liturgist.His Prologus in tonarium (also called ‘Musica Bernonis’), compiled between 1021 and 1036, was a popular textbook, widely distributed throughout the 11th and ...
Abchasia
(᾽Αβασγία), northern portion of ancient Colchis bordering on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. In the 4th C. Abchasia became part of the kingdom of Lazika; it probably developed ...
Abd al- Mumin
(1094–1163)Founder of the Almohad (properly Muwahhad, ‘Unitarian’) dynasty in North Africa. When Ibn Tumart died in 1128, Abd al-Mumin kept his death secret for two years till his own ...
ʿAbd al-Malik
(r. 685–705)Umayyad caliph responsible for standardizing imperial coinage and collecting a corpus of hadith to be interpreted by appointed faqihs (Muslim jurists), causing hadith to emerge as a ...
ʼAbdisho of Nisibis
(died 1318)Metropolitan bishop of Nisibis (now Nusaybin, South-East Turkey) and Armenia, he was the last of the great Syro-oriental authors. His work of philosophy and theology, entitled The Pearl ...
Abinnaeus Archive
The papyri of Flavius Abinnaeus, Roman praefectus alae of Dionysias in the Fayyūm, covering the years 340/1–351. The documents, 80 in Greek and two in Latin, probably came from Philadelphia ...
Abiotikion
(ἀβιωτίκιον, from abiotos, lit. “unlivable”), a charge on the transfer of the property of an individual who died intestate and without children. Andronikos II's novel of May 1306 (Reg 4 ...
abjuration of the realm
(12th–16th centuries)English legal process whereby felons forswore their goods and the realm of England and were granted passage beyond the kingdom. Abjurers were required to select a port of ...
Ablabius
(᾽Αβλάβιος), an influential family in the eastern part of the later Roman Empire. The family founder was Flavius Ablabius, a Cretan. A man of humble origin, he served under the ...
Abraham ben Shmuel Abulafia
(Saragossa, 1240–c.1291)The founder of the prophetic school of Kabbalah. He combined Maimonides’ philosophical esotericism with the linguistic techniques of the Rhenan Jewish pietists, known as ...
Abraham ibn da'ud
(early 12th c. – c.1180)Jewish philosopher, born at Cordova, Abraham Ibn Da'ud lived mainly at Toledo, where he may have suffered martyrdom. His main work, Emuna rama (Sublime faith) ...
Abraham of Freising
(r. 957–93/94)(bishop) After the Hungarian incursions, Abraham restored Freising to a position of prominence. An early tutor of the future Henry II, Abraham was rewarded for his services to ...
Abraham's Bosom
(Heb., be-heiko shel Avraham).An expression indicating the location of righteous souls. It led to the famous ‘malapropism’ of the Hostess in Shakespeare's Henry V: ‘Nay, sure he's [Falstaff] not ...
Abramios, John
Astrologer and astronomer; fl. Constantinople and Mytilene, 1370–90.Abramios (᾽Αβράμιος) practiced magic and cast Horoscopes on behalf of Andronikos IV and his son John VII, in their quarrels with ...
